Sessions at @media 2010 on Friday 11th June

Andy Clarke’s Hardboiled Web Design is an uncompromising look at how to make the most from modern design tools and browsers, up-to-date techniques and processes. In this practical, design focussed talk, Andy will discuss the ‘how’ as well as the ‘why’ and will challenge your preconceptions to help you make better work for the web.

Andy will demonstrate the most modern, forward-moving and sometimes experimental CSS techniques while emphasising why a forward looking approach to CSS will pay real dividends.

Inclusive Design is currently the domain of people who design physical things, like product designers and architects, but Sandi Wassmer is firm in her belief that Inclusive Design applied in the online environment just makes sense.

The principles of Inclusive Design encompass so many of the practices, principles and guidelines that web designers are already using – Accessibility, Usability, User Centric Design, Progressive Enhancement and User Experience – but unlike each of these discrete practices, Inclusive Design gives designers the ability to offer choice, as a single design solution will never accommodate all users.

Sandi will talk about how the principles of Inclusive Design can be easily adopted by web designers right now. By the end of the session you’ll have the framework for becoming an inclusion activist!

It’s a great time to be building mobile location apps. Phones with GPS and compasses are now widely deployed, with good mobile data plans available. Projects like Geonames and OpenStreetMap are creating reusable datasets that provide the data backbone for your service. Open source mapping and GIS software is getting better and better.

How do applications like Foursquare, the Dopplr Social Atlas and Twitter (with its new geolocation API features) bring people into the equation? We’ll explore how location data can be improved through the collective intelligence of a social network.

We’ll consider how the interaction design of a service can be as important as its database schema for successful data analysis. We’ll highlight the most interesting systems out there, and give a comparison between the different platforms and styles of application available to you.

Server-side JavaScript has really started to take off, with a number of great projects providing different pieces of the puzzle. This talk will introduce server-side JavaScript and provide an overview of the existing projects as well as some ideas about where it’s all going in the future.

Tom will look at how the various JavaScript runtimes, such as V8 and Rhino, affect development and provide their own unique features. You’ll also see the standardisation effort of Common.js and why it’s shaping how people write server-side JavaScript.

All the leading SSJS frameworks – Node.js, Narwhal, Jaxer – will be discussed as well as some more quirky uses of JavaScript on the server such as CouchDB and YQL.

Hannah Donovan will talk about the designer as a storyteller—especially in terms of the importance of this role within a team. Improve your output as a designer by taking a closer look at influencing the input. As a visual narrator we help to visualise, inspire and curate for the people we work with as well as connecting scenarios around the larger product saga that supports the interfaces we design. By examining your input, make your output more effective with your team and users alike, paving paths for people to tell their own stories as your product evolves over time.

HTML5 is all the rage with the cool kids, and although there’s a lot of focus on the new language, there’s plenty for web app developers with new JavaScript APIs both in the HTML5 spec and separated out as their own W3C specifications. This session will take you through demos and code and show off some of the outright crazy bleeding edge demos that are being produced today using the new JavaScript APIs. But it’s not all pie in the sky – plenty is useful today, some even in Internet Explorer!

Specifically we’ll be looking at scripting the video media element, 2D canvas and some of the mashups we can achieve. How to take our web apps completely offline, going beyond the cookie and HTML5’s answer to threading: web workers.

Hype and tall tales dominate our knowledge of innovation history, and without awareness of the truth, we are set up to fail as creators, progressives, engineers and designers in our own time. This fun, fast paced, provocative keynote, based on a fresh take from the bestselling book The Myths of Innovation, will dissect the deepest mythologies and the latest misguided hype laden marketing propaganda, revealing the truths about good ideas and progress that anyone can use in their own work.